BetterALife

Goal: $7,000.00

Specific Need

BetterALife is growing each week!

• 40 children attend our weekly Homework Club on Tuesday evenings, where we provide a full hot meal.

• 894 children receive weekend lunch bags each month to ensure they have food when school meals are unavailable.

• 250 people per week receive groceries to support their households.

• 40 children per month participate in life skills lessons, including cooking classes.

Your donation will help us expand these programs, allowing more children to receive the support they need. As we grow into new areas to reach even more children in need, our food costs alone amount to approximately $1,500 per week—and this number is increasing rapidly.

We need your help to continue growing and meeting the needs of children right here in our community.

Mission

Our mission is to feed anyone who says, "I am hungry."

We show youth and families the educational and job-related opportunities they can pursue and inspire hope for a bright future. Every child should know they are loved, cared for, and not forgotten.

We believe and have seen that providing food, educational assistance, and life-skill services can help break the cycle of poverty and create a brighter future for individuals and families in need. Our programs provide children and families with the resources to succeed, inspire hope, and empower them to pursue their dreams.

Profile

A child comes home after school who ate lunch, around 10:30 am to 11ish. It is now around 3 pm, and they are coming home off the bus, going to their empty apartment as the parent(s) are at work, and opening the fridge for a snack. They see nothing. They then go to the cabinet and look there; nothing is found again. Frustrated, they sit down to work on homework and cannot focus because of the hunger pains in thier stomach, so they go outside to play instead to distract themselves. This puts the child behind in school, provides a situation where they end up getting help from the wrong crowd, and creates confusion, anger, hurt, and at just seven years old, they don't understand why.

Our focus is to feed any child who says they are hungry. If a child states they are hungry, we take that statement seriously and ensure they have a full belly. It's not a child's fault they are hungry. We pack 700 bags of lunch, snacks, and breakfast each month, provide cooking classes for life skills, and ensure weekly education assistance in our homework club with a hot dinner along with a one to one mentor for the children to have. We also positioned our food pantry within walking distance of three income-based communities in Purcellville that we serve so the families and children do not struggle to get help. Children walk directly to us.